Odia GenAI and side notes with Paninian Sanskrit
A casual comparison
My connect with Odia..
Came across this Odia Gen AI video in Linkedin.
Growing up, I was indifferent to the myriad languages in my backyard. Science and Math seemed prime. In passing years, all streams seem to be talking..
My laidback childhood summers was in this tiny village in Orissa. That’s where I picked some bare bone cues in Odia. Me raised in Bangalore, and otherwise spoke English and some Telugu, bits of Hindi all my life.
Odia and Sanskrit commonalities
I was trying to baseline the Odia grammar in this video to my knowledge of Sanskrit and Hindi.
Many parts chimed with the Paninian grammar of Sanskrit.
The idea of Noun Cases Kaaraka and vibhakti.
Different kinds of verbs. The verbs describing tangible interactions in the physical world. The verbs describing the acts in the mental space.. This resonated with parasmai pada and atmane pada concepts in Sanskrit.
Verbs which don’t need an object.. The flower blooms. She sleeps. Verbs which have one object. Verbs which support two objects. Simply said.. akarmaka sakarmaka & dwikarmaka dhaatu
Verbs can be made causative kaaranAtmaka make some one eat.. khilaana kinds
Idea of verb adjectives.. Udanta chidiya is flying bird.. Jalanta koila is burning coal.
Idea of Adjectives being before or after noun. beautiful daughter vs daughter is beautiful. Sundaro Jio vs Jio sundaro ochi. While the former case narrows down the qualities of daughter, the later case enumerates and expands the properties of the object in description. A very interesting paradigm of narrowing and expanding the scopes..
Idea of verbal nouns like maarjana cleaning.. The list of Sanskrit/Odia/Hindi similarities goes on.
Differences with Sanskrit
While the commonalities exist, one thing that suddenly stood out was the idea of base verbs. In fact, I just realised, this idea exists in Hindi too..
The main verb piggybacks to the base verb.. Look at these sentences conveying past tense..
उट पड़ी “stomed off” (feminine)
चल पड़ा “walked off” (masc)
रो पड़ा “burst into tears” (masc)चल उटा “started walking” [tone of emphasis]
बोल उटा “spoke up”सो गई “fell asleep”
रो गया “cried”मार डाला “killed” [tone of intentional]
In present tense, we have
चल रहा है “is walking”
I don’t think Sanskrit has this. To me, they seem to serve 3 purposes.
1. One aspect is the tense.. present vs past . (उटा, गया) indicate past action vs ongoing (रहा)
2. A sense of tone is found in this side verb.. intentional (डाला), unintentional (पड़ा). There is strong emphasis in (उटा) vs a more neutral tone in (रहा )
3. And the gender and number of the Kartha/doer is embedded in these side verbs.
A friend once asked, where did this verb based gender thing in Hindi come from? An Urdu facet? I get reminded of this topic again..
In Sanskrit, verbs are not variant to gender. On the other hand, the entire spectrum of nouns, pronouns, adjectives are seen as one of the 3 genders, and a complex matrix of vibhakti follows suit.
Meerabhai’s bhajan too seemed to have gender in the verb. Perhaps this verb gender and verb expansion is a linguistic simplification in the Prakrit languages.
I asked James Cooper. He said he would be interested in knowing about it too.
If you keep apart Hindi, how is verb gender in case of braj/bhojpuri/maithali?
Meerabhai’s payoji mein ne,
जनम-जनम की पूंजी पाई
In the era of GenAI, perhaps Sanskrit embeddings has something unique and phenomenal.. Regional languages can perhaps leverage Sanskrit and PRakrit feature sets..
